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A Picture of Hope
I came to Cyprus.
I came to Cyprus because of the reasons that my parents left.
That might sound strange since my parents left
as a result of the conflict,
and I came here because of it.
Let me go back to a time when
that responsibility was instilled in me.
The story begins when I first came to Cyprus at the age of four.
In my grandparents’ living room
surrounded by pictures of our family members on the wall,
was a framed photo in black and white
of a couple who are not familiar to me.
I asked my grandmother, ‘who is that?’
and she replied, ‘they are the people who used to live here.’
She was referring to the Greek Cypriots who owned the house.
‘Well, why don’t they live here anymore?
Why can’t we visit them, or why don’t they come to see us?’
I had so many questions.
As far as I was concerned, I knew everyone on that wall
except the couple.
Their photo stayed on the wall for decades.
How do you explain to a four year old
that thousands of people were displaced across the island during the conflict?
That they had to leave their homes and stay in refugee camps
That Turkish Cypriots were given Greek Cypriot homes to live in
until further notice.
Perhaps this is the reason my grandmother
left that photo on the wall.
Maybe she thought that one day soon
everything would be solved
and those people would come back home, and she’s go back to hers.
But the division still continues after more than 30 years
causing suffering for people long after the fighting ended.
I remember I was a teenager
and one day in my grandparents’ home,
I woke up to a loud scream in the house.
It was my grandmother.
She’d had a nightmare where she was rushing to leave her home
and as she turns around,
she sees a soldier pointing a gun at her.
She wakes up just before he pulls the trigger.
At that moment in time,
I realise and am certain that something is wrong.
I didn’t know the history,
I had no idea what had happened or why it happened.
All I knew was that there was a suffering in the people I knew,
and an invisibility in the people I could not know.
The people on the wall.
Years went by and many grandchildren were born
and added to my grandparents’ wall.
Eventually, the mysterious couple disappeared from the wall.
In 2003, when the checkpoints opened up,
my grandmother eventually returned the photo
to visiting relatives of the couple on the wall.
Despite her fears and nightmares,
She distilled a sense of hope in all of us,
by keeping that photo for decades next to pictures of us.
She taught us that by giving back to a family
something so sentimental
by making one small gesture of goodwill,
we can, as a community, contribute something to make a difference.
She taught us that this is a responsibility
we all have, not just to ourselves,
but to each other.
This island of love, Cyprus,
it possesses a person
and that is why we come back
or why we won’t leave.
The photos, the stories and the memories of its people
need to be unscrambled and joined back together,
so that we can all see the beauty of the full picture.